Soccer graduation

On Saturday Ruby officially graduated from the local soccer club.

Hang on, I hear you say, surely you don’t graduate from a soccer club?

Well if you’re in Japan, where they love nothing more than a good ceremony, then yes you do. The end of primary school graduation is a truly major event (hear what Ruby has to say about rehearsals for her upcoming graduation here) and the soccer club likes to follow suit. And because few of the kids will be sticking with soccer, given all the club activities they are expected to undertake at high school, the soccer graduation really does represent the end of an era.

Thus it was that Saturday’s normal training session was followed by a little ceremony in which the director and president gave speeches, each of the coaches gave speeches, the graduating kids gave speeches… there were lots of speeches. And then there were presentations. They even made each kid give their parent a flower to say “thanks for taking me to training week in week out for the past six years.”  I do believe that’s the first time I’ve ever been given a flower by anyone, let alone my daughter. (Not that she thought of it herself; and as we all know it’s the thought that counts.)

I should at this point give some background about the club. It’s called Mihara UFC and it’s a small club with probably not more than 100 kids, as befits a town of about 100,000. They train on Wednesdays and Saturdays, with additional futsal training/matches on Monday and Thursday nights for the super-keen. (We’re not quite at that stage yet.) There isn’t a defined season with matches every week and league ladders and an eventual champion; instead, they train all year round and once or twice per month they organise all-day round-robin competitions with nearby teams, usually called the Something-or-other Cup. Ruby’s first match is coming up on 20-21 March (a two-day affair, although if you get knocked out on the Saturday you don’t both turning up on Sunday), and Felix has his first one on April 24.

Like any local soccer club, Mihara UFC is basically run by volunteers, including all the coaches. It’s obviously a more informal environment than the primary school, and this has provided Ruby and Felix with a vastly different challenge in terms of settling in: given that there was no formal introduction by the school principal, the other kids pretty much ignored them at first simply because they didn’t know what to do with them (or if they could speak Japanese). But this impasse didn’t last too long. Felix, as you might expect, zoomed right in without a care, but Ruby, as you might also expect, took a while to come to grips with the idea of playing in a team of boys. Then she warmed to the idea. Then we discovered that there was in fact another girl who must have been away. Then Ruby decided that she wanted to be the ONLY girl in the team, before finally deciding that she might be able to accommodate another girl after all. (Such a princess.)

In any case, it all changes again when the new school year kicks off in April. With so few of the Grade Sixes expected to return, those that do stay on are nominally lumped in together in what’s called the Youth team. So Ruby will be playing alongside boys from Year 7 (her compatriots) as well as years 8 (including the Other Girl, who is called Momo and is actually very nice), Year 9 and possibly Year 10. She’ll have to really run hard and learn to push them out of the way if she wants the ball.

In other exciting news, the Mihara UFC director has entered Ruby in an all-girl team that’s associated with Hiroshima Sanfrecce, the local J-League team. In other words it’s like playing for the U13 Girls division of Melbourne Victory. As you can imagine I’m very excited about this. Training is on Friday nights and involves a train ride to a nearby town. Momo is also in this team so the two of them can catch the train together and become firm friends and all that soppy parent stuff.

Stay tuned for a full report on this weekend’s Whatever-it-is Cup…